PlatformActive2026 to now
Health ID
A health ID from birth
A provisional health ID issued at birth or at the first vaccination, linked to the mother, built on the NIN rather than against it, and designed to keep working in a clinic with no signal. An experimental answer to a problem set by eHealth Africa on the NITDA Builders Festival.
- Type
- Platform
- For
- Self-commissioned
- Started
- 27 September 2026
- Running
- In build
- Sector
- Health, Digital public infrastructure
- What we do
- Field research, Service design, Product design, Platform engineering
- Live at
- Try the demo
What it is
A health identity layer. A person gets a provisional ID at birth or at the first vaccination, and any clinic can look them up with it. Hospitals keep their full records. The ID carries a short summary that the patient controls, and a consent record for every share.
The problem
Every Nigerian who has used more than one hospital owns more than one hospital card. A child's vaccinations are split across clinics, so nobody can say which doses were missed. Revitalised primary health centres alone record around 45 million visits a quarter, by the Minister of Health's own figure, and each visit can mint another card.
Who it is for
Patients and mothers, the nurses and front desks who register them, and the programmes that need to know who has been seen and who has not.
How we are going about it
- Build on the NIN as the national identity, and add the health layer on top.
- Issue IDs in blocks to each clinic, so registration works offline and syncs later.
- Match people by phone, name and date of birth, tolerating spelling differences.
- Make NIN verification optional, and never a condition of care.
- Keep the full record in the hospital. Share only the ID and a summary the patient controls.
Where it stands
A working prototype with fictional people, live as a public demo that resets every night. It has not been in front of a real clinic yet.
What is here
Case studyA health ID from birthThe full write-up: what the problem was, what we built, and what it produced.Read the case study →Livehealthid.senpaifutures.comThe thing itself, runningFollow Health ID
New notes on this project as they are written, and everything else we publish while building the digital infrastructure Africa needs. Roughly weekly.
No pitch, and one click to leave.
Notes are added while the work happens. The case study is what it added up to.